President Pranab says India and Bangladesh should walk ‘ shoulder to shoulder’

Asserting that the two Asian neighbours are inheritors of an undivided civilizational legacy, President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday said India and her people share a special connection with Bangladesh.

 
“It is with pride that Bangladesh engages in the task of building a modern, progressive and prosperous nation. As in 1971, so in 2013, the people of India stand beside the people of Bangladesh. We will walk with you as equal partners, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm. We are both inheritors of an undivided civilizational legacy. It is no wonder that India and her people share a special connection with Bangladesh. We have an abiding interest in the all-round development of Bangladesh,” said President Mukherjee in his acceptance and banquet speech on receipt of Bangladesh ‘Liberation War Honour’.
 
” However, the full potential of our cooperation is yet to be tapped. My discussions during this visit have been extremely rewarding. Our Governments have established a comprehensive framework for cooperation. Our endeavour will be to see how our bilateral cooperation can bring sustained benefits to our people and improve the quality of their lives. This will be the litmus test of the success of our relationship,” he added.
 
President Mukherjee said India is happy to see the tremendous strides made by Bangladesh.
 
“The impressive and path-breaking manner in which Bangladesh has faced the challenges of eradication of poverty is worthy of emulation. I pay tribute to the people of Bangladesh, its farmers, entrepreneurs, doctors, teachers, scientists and many others who represent the creative genius of its people,” he added.
 
President Mukherjee said he is delighted to be in Bangladesh and grateful for the affection bestowed on him on his first state visit abroad after the assumption of the office of the President of India.
 
“As I stand here tonight, I am filled with memories of the events of 1971. I was 36 years old and a Member of Parliament when the people of Bangladesh engaged themselves in their liberation struggle. Many of us were passionately concerned about the events that were unfolding then. 24-hour television channels did not exist in those days – and it was the Free Bangladesh Radio and All India Radio that gave us reports of the heroic struggle of our brothers and sisters in Bangladesh,” said President Mukherjee.

 ”These bulletins were keenly followed by us in India – as the minds and hearts of all Indians were with the people of Bangladesh. The plight of millions of homeless people crossing the border, seeking refuge in the neighbouring States of India stirred the hearts of our people as they felt ine anguish of that hapless multitude. They came forward wholeheartedly to succour and any assistance they could provide to their brethren from Bangladesh in their hour of need. The images of the proud people of Bangladesh and their brave fight for justice and dignity were etched in every Indian’s consciousness,” he added.
 
President Mukherjee recalled that on June 15, 1971, he had the privilege to initiate a discussion on the floor of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, when he suggested that India should accord diplomatic recognition to the Government of Bangladesh in exile in Mujibnagar.
 
“My words are on the record in proceedings of Rajya Sabha. When a Member sought my suggestion on how to tackle the problem, I responded by saying: “I am talking of a political solution which means categorically recognising the sovereign democratic Government of Bangladesh. Political solution means giving material help to the democratic, sovereign Government of Bangladesh…,” said President Mukherjee.
 
” I reminded the House of the many instances in world history when intervention on similar grounds had taken place in past.,” he added.
 
President Mukherjee further said ‘as a Member of Indian Delegation in the 59th Conference of Inter Parliamentary Union in Paris (France) in 1971 from 2nd to 10th September, we took the opportunity of the presence of large number of Members of Parliaments of different countries to explain the situation in Bangladesh and urged them to prevail upon their Governments to speak out against the violation of human rights in Bangladesh’.
 
“I also had the privilege of visiting the United Kingdom and the then Federal Republic of Germany as a Member of the Goodwill Parliamentary Delegation in the same visit. I was mandated to brief the Members of the Parliaments and to the leaders of those countries about the situation. Late Shri H.D. Malviya, former Member of Parliament and activist of the World Peace Council had accompanied me in this mission,” said President Mukherjee.
 
“Later I was given the responsibility of visiting the refugee camps in the neighbouring  States of India – including Tripura, Assam and Meghalaya and coordinating with the local Governments on making them functional and comfortable,” he added.

 

Pope to Resign : First to do so since 1415

 After Pope Benedict XVI announced his plans for resignation, many are wondering who will take his place.

(ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images)

Pope Benedict XVI said Monday he lacks the strength to fulfill his duties and on Feb. 28 will become the first pontiff in 600 years to resign. The announcement sets the stage for a conclave in March to elect a new leader for world’s 1 billion Catholics.The 85-year-old pope announced the bombshell in Latin during a meeting of Vatican cardinals, surprising even his closest collaborators, even though Benedict had made clear in the past he would step down if he became too old or infirm to do the job.

Benedict called his choice “a decision of great importance for the life of the church.”

Indeed, the move allows the Vatican to hold a conclave before Easter to elect a new pope, since the traditional mourning time that would follow the death of a pope doesn’t have to be observed.

It will also allow Benedict to hold great sway over the choice of his successor. He has already hand-picked the bulk of the College of Cardinals — the princes of the church who will elect the next pope — to guarantee his conservative legacy and ensure an orthodox future for the church.

There are several papal contenders in the wings, but no obvious front-runner — the same situation when Benedict was elected pontiff in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II.

The Vatican stressed that no specific medical condition prompted Benedict’s decision, but in recent years, the pope has slowed down significantly, cutting back his foreign travel and limiting his audiences. He now goes to and from the altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on a moving platform, to spare him the long walk down the aisle. Occasionally he uses a cane.

His 89-year-old brother, Georg Ratzinger, said doctors had recently advised the pope not to take any more trans-Atlantic trips.

“His age is weighing on him,” Ratzinger told the dpa news agency. “At this age my brother wants more rest.”

Benedict emphasized that carrying out the duties of being pope — the leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics worldwide — requires “both strength of mind and body.”

“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry,” he told the cardinals.

“In order to govern the bark of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary — strengths which in the last few months, have deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me,” he said.

Popes are allowed to resign; church law specifies only that the resignation be “freely made and properly manifested.” But only a handful have done it.

The last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII, who stepped down in 1415 in a deal to end the Great Western Schism among competing papal claimants. The most famous resignation was Pope Celestine V in 1294; Dante placed him in hell for it.

When Benedict was elected at age 78, he was the oldest pope chosen in nearly 300 years. At the time, he has already been planning to retire as the Vatican’s chief orthodoxy watchdog to spend his final years writing in the “peace and quiet” of his native Bavaria.

On Monday, Benedict said he would serve the church for the remainder of his days “through a life dedicated to prayer.” The Vatican said immediately after his resignation, Benedict would go to Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer retreat south of Rome, and then would live in a cloistered monastery.

Contenders to be his successor include Cardinal Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the archbishop of Vienna, and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Canadian head of the Vatican’s office for bishops.

Longshots include Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. Although Dolan is popular and backs the pope’s conservative line, the general thinking is that the Catholic Church doesn’t need a pope from a “superpower.”

Given half of the world’s Catholics live in the global south, there will once again be arguments for a pope to come from the developing world.

Cardinal Antonio Tagle, the archbishop of Manila, has impressed many Vatican watchers, but at 56 and having only been named a cardinal last year, he is considered too young.

Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson of Ghana is one of the highest-ranking African cardinals at the Vatican, currently heading the Vatican’s office for justice and peace, but he’s something of a wild card.

All cardinals under age 80 are allowed to vote in the conclave, the secret meeting held in the Sistine Chapel where cardinals cast ballots to elect a new pope. As per tradition, the ballots are burned after each voting round; black smoke that snakes out of the chimney means no pope has been chosen, while white smoke means a pope has been elected.

The pontiff had been due to attend World Youth Day in July in Rio de Janeiro; by then his successor will have been named and will presumably make the trip.

Benedict himself raised the possibility of resigning if he were simply too old or sick to continue on, when he was interviewed in 2010 for the book “Light of the World.”

“If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign,” Benedict said.

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had an intimate view as Pope John Paul II, with whom he had worked closely for nearly a quarter-century, suffered through the debilitating end of his papacy.

The announcement took the Vatican — and the rest of the world — by surprise.

Several cardinals on Monday didn’t even understand what Benedict had said during the consistory, said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman said. Others who did were stunned.

“All the cardinals remained shocked and were looking at each other,” said Monsignor Oscar Sanchez of Mexico who was in the room when Benedict made his announcement.

Benedict was born April 16, 1927 in Marktl Am Inn, in Bavaria, but his father, a policeman, moved frequently and the family left when he was 2.

In his memoirs, Benedict dealt what could have been a source of controversy had it been kept secret — that he was enlisted in the Nazi youth movement against his will when he was 14 in 1941, when membership was compulsory. He said he was soon let out because of his studies for the priesthood. Two years later he was drafted into a Nazi anti-aircraft unit as a helper. He deserted the German army in April 1945, the waning days of the war.

He called it prophetic that a German followed a Polish pope — with both men coming from such different sides of World War II.

Benedict was ordained, along with his brother, in 1951. After spending several years teaching theology in Germany, he was appointed bishop of Munich in 1977 and elevated to cardinal three months later by Pope Paul VI.

John Paul named him leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981 and he took up his post a year later. Following John Paul’s death in 2005, he was elected pope April 19 in one of the fastest conclaves in history, just about 24 hours after the voting began.

 

Stuttgart City Library -Germany

Stuttgart City Library

The city of Stuttgart, Germany has officially opened a marvelous new media center, the Stuttgart City Library.  This cavernous white wonder is unobtrusive in design, where the books and visitors provide the color to an otherwise neutral environment.  The visual center of the Stuttgart City Library is its grand atrium, a five-story open chamber that feels like the work of a modernist MC Esher.  The interior is bright without direct lighting, it is warm without paint color and intimate yet open.  This work by Yi Architects is a success in design, instantly one of the world’s most beautiful libraries.

Deconstructing Hitler: Germany to produce biopic on Nazi dictator

Germany is to produce a TV mini-series on the life of Adolf Hitler. The series will follow Hitler from his youth as a solider in World War One to his suicide at the end of World War II.

­“We thought the time was right for a German look at Hitler, at his life,” Beta Film producer Jan Mojto is quoted as saying.

The country’s two leading TV producers agreed to unite their efforts and the resources to shoot the saga entitled Hitler’s First War.

“This will be a demystification of Hitler, a look at how he created his own history and created myths that seduced the German people,” Nico Hofmann of TeamWorx explained at the TV and entertainment market MIPCOM, in Cannes.

“The series will be a direct look at the biggest evil of this century: how it happened and where it came from,” he added.

The series is reportedly budgeted at between $20 million-$25 million according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The eight-part mini-series will be adapted from the biography by the award-winning historian Thomas Weber, the author of the Lodz Ghetto Album, a collection by a Jewish photographer whose images shed new light on how ghetto society functioned during the Holocaust.

The Hollywood Reporter is quoting Weber as saying that the only way to get to the bottom of the influence the Nazi leader had over millions of Germans was by “taking Hitler’s skills of self-invention seriously, his talents and weaknesses, his cold savagery but also his outright personal charm.”

 

 

 

Want to make international friends and fight crime? Join German FBI!

View of a logo of Germany's intelligence agency the Bundesnachrichtendienst.(AFP Photo / John Macdougall)

Germany’s equivalent of the FBI has put out a notice inquiring about highly-trained computer professionals who know how to exploit windows, speak different languages, and fight the bad guys. In short, Germany is developing its own spyware.

­Although the Bundeskriminalamt’s (BKA) job offer is not overt, it is neither by any means secret. Germany is seeking to develop its own state brand of spyware in an effort to fight crime and curb terrorism. According to the advert, job applicants must “demonstrate a sound knowledge of C++…have a very good knowledge of low-level programming and the security mechanisms of Windows,” and exhibit a “high degree of creativity.”

Also, if selected, the applicant will be “tenured”, meaning that he or she can only be fired through a difficult mutual decision, essentially guaranteeing the applicant a long career with the agency.

In keeping with Germany’s equal opportunity laws, female candidates will “be strongly considered.”

The notice goes further, stating that if selected, the applicants would have the opportunity to form “international partnerships” where foreign language skills would be required. Whether this is a veiled reference to working with the FBI and CIA is anyone’s guess, but the BKA has already systematically met with its counterparts from 2008-2012 to discuss the issue of shared spying software. Ryan Gallagher writing for Slate.com in April posted a letter from German Secretary of State Ole Schroder to MP Andrej Hunko that detailed the dates and names of the participants of these meetings. The list includes the FBI, Britain, Israel, France, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium among others.

There has been much criticism over the use of government spying practices in Germany over the years, asking what limits can be imposed to prevent unnecessary spying into private lives.

Vladimir Kremlev for RT

­

‘It’s about the bad guys’

­Government-sponsored spyware has definitely been the covert weapon of choice in recent days, as many intelligence agencies have been turning to the software to track individuals and harvest information about them. The complicated software can record your Skype conversations, mine your data, turn on your webcam, take screenshots, and copy your emails.

Only last summer, the Kaspersky Labs internet security firm helped discover the Flame spy virus in computers in the Middle East, sending information to an unknown command-and-control center. Kaspersky and others concluded that the technology was so elaborate that only a government could have sponsored its development and release.

The CIA was thought by many to have been behind the malware, but nothing was ever proved or tracked; flame had a remote “self-destruct” mechanism that wiped it from several computer systems the moment it was discovered.

Germany has also ventured into the murky legal waters of government spying once already. Outrage soared last year when the first German Trojan (or spyware program) was discovered in use by the country’s government.  The Chaos Computer Club (CCC), a hacker group credited with discovering the software, came to two conclusions. First, that it was full of defects. Second, that it was against German law.

German constitutional privacy laws protect a “basic right to the confidentiality and integrity of information-technological systems,” but even so, the German federal cabinet approved a bill in June 2008 that expands the jurisdiction of the BKA in criminal and terrorist cases.

Under the law the BKA can only use such software to track criminals, obtain information only if an individual’s life is in danger, or if the person being tracked has been deemed suspicious by the German government. Even so, there are loopholes.

Although the law says that the technology cannot be used without the President of the BKA or one of his associates acquiring a warrant from a German judge, the warrant can be circumvented at the BKA’s discretion if the threat of injury or destruction is deemed immediate, according to a report in the German publication Handelsblatt. However, the BKA must still obtain the corresponding warrant within three days of unleashing its spyware.

In its article, Handelsblatt joined with the rest of the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers in condemning the spy tactics, saying that “with all due respect to an improvement in the fight against crime, the newspaper publishers are very concerned about a climate in which policy obviously plays only a minor role.”

 

 

 

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• Want to make international friends and fight crime? Join German FBI! (EndtheLie.com)
• Want to make international friends and fight crime? Join German FBI! (rt.com)

Teen solves centuries-old math problem

 A 16-year-old in Germany who solved a centuries-old math problem credited his accomplishment to “schoolboy naivety.”

Shouryya Ray, whose family moved from India to Dresden when he was 12, solved a pair of fundamental particle dynamics problems posed by Isaac Newton more than 350 years ago to make it possible to calculate the flight path of a ball and predict how it will hit and bounce off a wall, The Local.de reported Wednesday.

Ray said he learned about the problems when his school, which specializes in science, sent his 11th grade class to the Technical University in Dresden.

The teenager said his “schoolboy naivety” would not allow him to accept that the problems couldn’t be solved.

“I asked myself: why can’t it work?” he told the Die Welt newspaper.

Ray said he is currently deciding whether to study math or physics when he moves on to college.

Marketing Strategies From Hitler

Hitler has been said to be the biggest dictators of all times. Even though people might deny that he was a good leader, he was still able to get the attention and the support from millions of people including the who’s who. One of his famous quotes include, “Repetition creates repetition.” So what did he do so great so as to make people believe in him, and market himself as being the greatest? Read to know the marketing strategies that one can learn from Hitler.

Word Of Mouth

Word-of-mouth publicity is one of the most important tools for marketing a product. Hitler (and the Nazis) made sure that they missed no opportunity to talk about themselves and their ideologies. They talked about themselves till the point that people were ready to accept that there is no ideology better than the Nazi’s. Startups should know that in order to grab the customer’s attention among the plethora of other products being offered by their competitors, they have to be omnipresent. They have to make their presence felt through each and every media that touches the customer: be it TV, radio, the print, social networks. This would create an impact in the mind of the customer and there would be no running away from the startup’s offering. But being a loud-mouth won’t do much good to the company. The marketing propaganda should be backed by a substantially good product, which would ensure that not only the company, but also the customers talk about the product.

Lie And Lie Consistently

Hitler is said to have fooled people by lying. Even though the truth might be several yards away from him, he ensured that he made the same statement each time, even if it was a white lie straight on the face of the person listening to him. He once quoted, “Tell a lie often enough, loud enough, and long enough, and people will believe you.” This policy is what all companies apply, even if their products are not good, they claim it to be the best, at all times. The peddler of lies reaches such a point that people start believing that the lie is actually the truth. Thus, if a startup is lying about any aspect of its offerings, it has to lie, and lie constantly, to a point that people start believing that it is the truth.

Lead Your Way To The Top

Hitler had a unique feature that he led the entire Nazi army on his own. They respected him to such an extent that they followed whatever he said. He just didn’t dump his ideas to his army, but lined it with a belief that whatever he was doing was about to change the world. This world-changing belief is what caught the attention of his army: that they were a part of something big, something magnanimous. Once you make your customers believe in you, there is no looking behind. You have to differentiate your offerings that the repeat buy heightens, making you the market leader. The reigning market leader is not a permanent fixture, if you can offer something even better than what is available now.

Visually Appealing Design

The Nazis could be made out from a distance. Their distinct uniform and symbols were what made them stand out in a crowd. Another important reason why the customer loyalty is higher towards certain products is because of their distinct packaging, which makes them so attractive that the other products are sidelined. Thus, make your offering visually appealing, which would grab the customer’s attention at the first sight itself. You can use various packaging strategies or color combinations to ensure that your product stands out from the rest.

Related articles

• Hitler’s bed linen auctioned (time4sleep.co.uk)
• The Qualities of a Powerful Word-of-Mouth Marketing Strategy (hubspot.com)
• Korean Cosmetics Company Creates World’s Most Tasteless Serum Ad (bellasugar.com)
• Bedtime with Hitler: Nazi leader’s linen for sale (ibtimes.com)

Top 10 Countries Which Waste Most Food

About one third of the food production has wasted annually all over the world in the year 2011. Most loss of food occurs during production in under developed countries, whereas in developed countries about 100 kilograms of food is waste at the consumption stage by each person in a year.

The cause for this may be biological, environmental, social and economical. It is also difficult to reduce the food waste produced by processing because while reducing we must see that it is reduced without affecting the quality of the finished product.

Over the past ten years, the Medias have done an exceptional job by covering the problems of world hunger. Most of us don’t even realize how many people in our own cities struggle hard every night to feed their families. The simple reason for this is, they don’t want their family members to sleep with empty stomach. The waste of food doesn’t just be limited to the grocery stores, instead this problem continues right into our kitchen and to our dinning tables.

While millions of people all around the world are struggling for two times of meals per day, tons of foods are being wasted by many people, primarily by the people of developed countries.

Based on OECD Environmental Data Compendium, here is a top 10 countries where most food is wasted:

United States of America:

In a recent study conducted by the University of Arizona showed that around 40 to 50 percent of all food which is ready for harvest never gets ate. In the nation about 760 kilograms of food is wasted by each person in a year. The country spends about $1billion per year just to dispose the foods that are wasted. According to Environmental Protection Agency, food leftovers are the single-largest part of the waste flow by weight in the U.S. The food waste in the country includes uneaten food and food preparation scraps from residences, commercial establishments like restaurants, institutional cafeterias etc.

Australia:

Australians waste up to 3 million tons of food per year. From a research done by the Australia Institute showed that, Australians throwaway about $ 5.2 billion worth of food every year. This also includes $ 1.1 billion of fruit and vegetables. The estimates of the research showed that the average Australian household throws away $ 616 worth of food per year. About 690 kilograms of food is wasted by each person per year. According to Australian Bureau of Statistical Data, each Victorian household wastes more than $1000 worth of food every year and that is bringing the state’s annual food waste bill to $2.5 billion.

Denmark:

In Denmark, the percentage of food wasted by Danes is 660 kilograms foe each person per year. The reasons for the waste of food are due to waste in households, catering centers etc. So, to stop wasting food by the Danes, A movement called ‘Stop wasting Food’ was conducted. The purpose of this movement was to fight against food waste and over-consuming. While there are about 6 million children in the world who are dying of hunger every year, every Danish citizen in average is throwing 63 kilos of good food every year. The movement also pointed upon the effects of food waste. Food waste is also very bad for the environment as it causes raise in CO2 emissions and that can play a main part in global warming.

Canada:

An enormous amount of food is wasted unnecessarily in Canada every year. This waste has turned out to be a negative impact on the country’s economy and environment. Majority of food is wasted in the country occurs to be from the consumer level. Every month, residents in the city of Toronto throw out 17.5 million of food. The waste of food in the country also comes from over production. In Toronto, each household produces about 275 kilos of food waste each year. In the country 51 percent of the food waste comes from the households, 18 percent of the waste has come from the packaging and processing and 11 percent of the waste comes from retail stores.

Norway:

In Norway, about 3, 35,000 tons of all the food being produced in Norway is ending as waste. Large amount of food waste is undesirable for environmental, ethical and economical reasons. The largest volumes of food waste in the country are found for fruits, vegetables and bakery products. Meat products have the largest impact on release of climate gases and economy. Most of the food is thrown out by consumers because it has expired. The food wasted by Norwegians is around 620 kilos of food per person every year.

Netherlands:

In Dutch households they throw away a lot of food. They waste of food in this country is approximately forty kilos per person every year. So to avoid this Wageningen UR Food and Biobased Research are finding ways to solve this problem in the nation. There are many strategies that are been developed and tests are carried out in a number of districts to persuade the Netherlands to throw away less food. In this country 610 kilos of food is wasted by each person every year.

Germany:

In Germany, food is thrown away by the bucket full of load while many people in other countries are dying of starvation. Around 20 million tons of food is thrown away in Germany each year, but there are no official statistics to confirm this number. In many supermarkets in the country, food is taken off from the shelf if it doesn’t look perfect, if there is no demand for it or the expiry date is over. For many years this problem of food waste was just being ignored. But now there’s a greater awareness, retailers and the Government of Germany have started looking for solutions. Around 540 kilos of food is wasted by every person each year.

United Kingdom:

Food waste in the United Kingdom is a was a subject of environmental, economic and social concerns. It has got widespread media coverage and it has been getting varied responses from the government. The largest producer of food waste I the UK is the domestic household. Potatoes, Bread slices and apples are thrown away. Potatoes account for the largest quantity of avoidable food disposed of 359,000 tons per year, Bread slices is the second food type that is disposed in the country with the dispose rate of 328,000 tons per month. Salads is disposed in the greatest proportion, salads that are purchased are thrown away uneaten at most of the time. Around 560 kilos of food is wasted by each person every year.

Malaysia:

In Malaysia it is found that most of the food is wasted by urban households. These urban Malaysians throw away close to one million kilos of food from their kitchen every day. This figure is forty percent more than what businesses and industries discard in through out the nation. Bread and fruits are the other food products that end up in garbage bins among the most common edibles.

Finland:

Food waste in Finland’s restaurants and retail sector were both found out to be around half of the food waste created in the household levels in the country. Among the most wasted food in the country was of the vegetables, homemade food products, dairy products, bread etc. The main reason for food waste was because the food was spoiled, best before date was expired etc. These facts were found out by the MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Biotechnology and Food Research Sustainable Bioeconomy, and MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Economic Research.

Related articles

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• Follow the Food – Waste in Ballard is going out of style (myballard.com)
• British shoppers bin nearly 10% of weekly shop, figures show (guardian.co.uk)
• UC chemistry research looks to turn food waste into fuel (physorg.com)
• Americans Waste Enough Food To Fill A Football Stadium – Every Day! (blisstree.com)

Albert Einstein’s warning letter to Jews sells for nearly $14,000

A letter from Albert Einstein warning the Jews of the “calamitous peril” posed to them by the Nazis was sold at an auction for double the estimated price at nearly $14000.

According to Los Angeles auction house, Nate D Sanders, the letter was in, “ very good to near fine condition” and was sold for $13,936 including buyer’s premium.

The typed letter, which the Nobel laureate wrote to a New York based businessman, Hyman Zinn, praises him for his work in helping the Jews flee harassment in Hitler’s Germany.

Einstein himself fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power and the letter was written three years after that in 1939.

“It must be a source of deep gratification to you to be making so important a contribution toward rescuing our persecuted fellow-Jews from their calamitous peril and leading them toward a better future,” the BBC quoted his letter, as stating.

“The power of resistance which has enabled the Jewish people to survive for thousands of years has been based to a large extent on traditions of mutual helpfulness.”

“In these years of affliction our readiness to help one another is being put to an especially severe test. May we stand this test as well as did our fathers before us,” he added.

Related articles

• Einstein’s letter on Nazis sold (bbc.co.uk)
• Einstein letter on Nazis sells for nearly $14,000 (cnn.com)

Technologies That were Banned

Every country is thriving to get higher pace of technology, each one of them desires to be the leader of innovation. But it is very much possible that some technologies may become threat to government itself and pose serious concern to its internal, external security, these calls for scrutiny over these modern technologies.

 Keeping some of the ongoing threats in mind, several countries have taken a bolder step to ban some of the technologies. Here are few of the countries and the technologies.

  Israel bans iPad

In April 2010, the anger of tech lovers went on its peak in Israel, as the much talked about iPad became inaccessible for them. The Communications Ministry announced that it was imposing a blanket ban on the import of Apple’s new tablet computer, the iPad, citing incompatibility with the European Wi-Fi standard, which is used in Israel. For this reason, several such computers have been confiscated by customs officials at Ben-Gurion Airport. The public went furious as the ban was only revealed when several of the devices were confiscated by customs officials.

 Pakistan Bans Facebook

In the year 2010, following a court’s order Pakistan officially blocked Facebook for offensive content.

A country with over 2.3 million Facebook users is temporarily restricted from its use due to a Facebook group called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” Cartoon sketches of Prophet Muhammad were considered as an act of blasphemy by Muslims and this Facebook page incurred huge criticism from several Muslims.

Facebook has a history of allowing controversial groups to develop a presence on their site. From death of Obama to Holocaust denial groups, Facebook consist of groups that is considered offensive by most.

UAE and Saudi Arabia banned Blackberry

On August 2010, two Gulf States, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia announced bans on some functions of the mobile phone amid national security concerns. Users of the BlackBerry in the UAE were barred from accessing email, web browsing and instant messaging from October 2010.

 The concern of both the countries came as they were unable to keep tabs on instant messaging and this affected almost half a million users.

Germany bans Galaxy Tab 10.1

Upholding Apple’s injunction request in the legal battle between the tech giants Apple and Samsung, German court banned the sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hoffman ruled to pull the 10.1-inch tablet from German shelves, saying the device’s “smooth, simple area” copies Apple’s iPad design.

 Greece barred Google street view

In 2009, Greece restricted the Google’s drivers running in the country to mount their camera for Google street view,highlighting a growing fear among Greeks of the threat posed by new technologies. Athens’s data protection agency barred the search engine saying Google has to provide “additional information” and concrete guarantees that the service was not an invasion of personal privacy before expanding the programme to Greece.

U.S. ban iPod

iPod player are a huge companion for marathon runners, but the U.S. Track and Field competitions banned the use of iPods and headphones to avoid competitive advantage to runners. The organizers defended its ban saying that runners must focus on the marathon and not on the music.

Cuba baned cell phones

Cuba’s government had limited access to mobile phones and other products and services deemed to be luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of life on the Communist led island.
Cubans and foreigners holding key government posts had been allowed to have cell phones since the technology first appeared in Cuba in 1991.
A major government restriction was changed since the 76-year-old Castro took over as leader of the island nation from his older brother Fidel Castro as he lifted the age old ban on April 2008.

India bans Chinese phones and gadgets

Chinese products have been doing a great business in the Indian Market as it comes in low coast but with all kinds of features. India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has issued a directive that calls for the banning of the import of mobile phones made by Chinese manufacturers. The move comes after the Indian Home Ministry expressed concerns regarding the proliferation of Chinese handsets in India. They were worried about the spyware and malware threat that these handsets posed. The ministry was also worried that these phones will offer intelligence agencies from China, access to telecom networks in India.

 Australia bans laser pointers

Australia banned laser point’s way back in 2008. The state has officially banned high-powered laser pointers specifically classifying them as ‘prohibited weapons.’ Anyone found carrying such a laser pointer in public without the Australian equivalent of a Firearms Certificate will be guilty of an offence punishable by up to fourteen years imprisonment.

UK bans Plasma TV

UK has banned energy-guzzling flatscreen plasma televisions as part of the battle against climate change.

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